Startup Weekend Dubai 2015, a 54-hour annual event, was staged at AstroLabs headquarters in Jumeirah Lake Towers from November 19-21. Organized in over 150 countries, more than 250 cities ran the Startup Weekend Global Startup Battle simultaneously last month. In the UAE alone, 103 entrants took part and 44 of those entrepreneurs even rose to the challenge of a 60-second warm up pitch on day one.

The first place winner, MyCars, is a model that allows users to find cars to rent in different cities and included team members Ben Pullen, Benjamin de Terssac, Finney Thomas, Heloise Andrade, and Zahed Mirza. Second place winner Fitness Buddies, a model based on matching users with other users for workouts, was made up of team members Amit Vaghasiya, Darreen Al-hiyari, Hina Gulzar, Jiahao Liu, Richard Humberstone, and Andrew Broekelmann.

Second place winner Fitness Buddies

Third place winner Wa9faat.com, created by Ahmed AbuSaad and Abdulhadi Hafez, facilitates access to Arabic recipes via referral. The B2B prizewinner of the event, VVIP, was made of up team members Andrey Simeonov, Danni Lu, Saber Ghaith, and Sajad Ahmed.